Retromediation Revisited, Material and Film Aesthetics, and Tacita Dean

So, I kinda-sorta ended up trying to answer my own question that I suggested a few weeks ago regarding the possibility of there being something I called ‘retromediation.’

I ended up defining retromediation as the intentional return to an earlier or old(er) form of media for the very material qualities of production that such a medium possesses. 

In so doing I hit upon the work of Tacita Dean who happens to have been the latest artists to be invited to install her work in the grand Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern here in London. While the physical jump from my classroom door to the work of Tacita Dean was only a few feet, I’m hoping that the conceptual one I took was a little bit greater. If a muddled academic mix of media and art theory with a healthy dose of neologisms are your thing then please read on. 

RETROMEDIATION: THE TRACE OF PRODUCTION IN THE AGE OF POST-MEDIA AESTHETICS

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“Re-presentation” … is less engaged in setting forth things or the image of things than it is in setting up the machine.”

— Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, 1981 p. 238

 It is more than mere coincidence that both of the featured artists at the Tate Modern for the duration of this course - Gerhard Richter and Tacita Dean - are living artists concerned with the materiality of media. These artists independently developed methods that allow them to showcase the tactility and materiality of their respective media. We occupy a particular historical moment in which questions of the materiality of media are becoming a dominant discussion in a very immaterial information age.

I use Lev Manovich’s term post-media a little bit self-consciously here, especially in relation to McLuhan’s “medium is the message.” Manovich has argued that technological (technical) developments have ended the need for medium-specificity in contemporary art criticism (Manovich 2001, 10). In fact though, I think that recent tendencies in art have chosen to emphasize the medium and to expose its materiality. In fact, it is this very self-conscious treatment of the medium that links the work of Richter and Dean together.

Viewing work in a post-media context does, however, allow us to read content and authorial intent; two admittedly outdated terms that have been prematurely banished from the art critical lexicon. There is an interesting intertextual commonality between the work of Gerhard Richter and Tacita Dean, namely that they have both, at certain points in their career, made use of found footage to create work. For Tacita Dean this was in her 2001 monograph Floh, while Richter created his first photo-paintings in the late 1960s based upon found photographs (see figures 1 and 2). Most notably for Richter, he has painstakingly recreated a realistic reproduction of the found photograph with his trademark brush blur or soft focus effect. Owing to Richter’s particular painting technique it seems almost as though he has artificially created a patina of age for the photo-painting, as if he had sealed it at that moment in time. The same could be said of Dean’s monograph of found photos since the reproductions enclosed on archival paper will surely not age the same as the original. They have preserved as a relic the ephemeral quality of the amateur photograph.

So as not to run into any surprises, I will let you know now that this exploration of trace will primarily focus on Tacita Dean, and her installation FILM (figure 3) at the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in 2011, and is mostly concerned with analogue film aesthetics. That being said, it is worth drawing attention to the fact that we will briefly venture into a digital realm to make some parallels with glitch art (see figure 4). It is interesting to notice that Gerhard Richter (see figure 5 for example), in his squeegee paintings especially, shares many technical and aesthetic attributes with certain types of glitch art.

From painting to film to the digital there is a constant dialogue between media that seeks to arbitrate and perhaps even to justify their continued existence. This will be the focus of the next section on remediation.

REMEDIATION

In introducing the concept of remediation, we are essentially asking the question of how media interact with each other and what happens when a new(er) medium seeks to encroach on the territory traditionally occupied by another medium. Drawing upon McLuhan’s trope that “the “content” of any medium is always another medium,” (McLuhan 1964, 8) Bolter and Grusin describe the interplay between competing media as a process of ‘remediation’ (Bolter and Grusin 2000).

Remediation is therefore the refashioning of the language, the signs and signifiers, of one medium by another. Bolter and Grusin describe this refashioning in the case of new media and the digital but also go to great lengths to note that the process of remediation is not particular to the digital era.

A few concrete examples will help to define this concept more clearly. In the context of web aesthetics, for example, the very structure of the internet is based around a series of pages, borrowing heavily from print media, which some may argue it is intended to usurp. Similarly, and most relevant for our discussion here, the language of digital video production is clearly tied to that of earlier film cinema with its cuts and edits.

Going further back in media history allows, according to Bolter and Grusin, for an even fuller confirmation of this effect. Films, then, are the remediation of stage plays and photography, and as they point out were originally called  ‘photoplays’ (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 67-69). It is worth pointing out that others such as Friedrich Kittler and Walter Benjamin have invoked similar descriptions in their treatment of early film history. Moving on from film then, photography can be seen as a remediation of painting borrowing the language of portraiture and landscape photography to cite a very simple example. Italian Renaissance painting and its incorporation of linear perspective as well as trompe l’oeil painting styles are the beginning of this march towards immediacy.

In fact, for Bolter and Grusin, the very definition of a medium “is that which remediates. It is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real” (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 65). It is this notion of representing the ‘real’ that becomes of most significance for them. Essentially, the goal of remediation and all contemporary media is to represent the real and to erase our awareness of the media itself. They call this transparency of the medium immediacy.

This tendency toward ever more ‘accurate’ representation of the real is dangerously akin to Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal (Baudrillard 1994, 12). In some sense then, the only way we can create an illusion of reality is by exaggerating the very reality we seek to represent. This is made abundantly clear when we take into account that Bolter and Grusin were, in 2000, writing about remediation, transparency, and reality in terms of the budding technology of VR or virtual reality. Today though, we are less concerned with VR than with AR or Augmented reality. This begs the much larger question of whether there is a return to the ‘real’ real i.e., an implicit acknowledgement of the futility of representation by media. I will return to this idea for a more extended look in the section ‘traces of production.’ For the moment though, this question must be put aside to return to the matter at hand – remediation.

As new(er) media encounter old(er) media there is a period of remediation in which the methods of production of the new(er) are restricted by the archetypes and language of the old(er). In fact, this is a crucial point for Tacita Dean and her choice to return to celluloid film in so much of her work including FILM (2011). As she states, “[d]igital cinema has not yet come into itself. It will, I am sure, when it becomes less preoccupied with imitating and destroying its antecedent, film, and more focused upon innovation and its own potential” (Dean 2011, 16). This implicit understanding of the pitfalls of remediation is a crucial dialogue to consider in relation to the sometimes blindly euphoric portrayal of remediation by Bolter and Grusin. It is quite possible then, that film with its extensive history of experimentation and representation is entering a period in which it is liberated from the shackles of remediation of previous forms – something that the immature medium of digital video has yet to achieve.

At the moment I would propose that there is actually a reactionary and opposing tendency towards a self-conscious exposure of the medium and a reactionary skepticism of the hyperreality of contemporary digital media. I call this reaction and the ensuing desire to return to a historical medium the process of retromediation.

RETROMEDIATION

DID NEW MEDIA KILL THE CINEMA STAR?

In Digital Baroque Timothy Murray asks the question “does new media stand forth as the memento mori of cinema?” (Murray, p. ix)

This question is a hallmark of the age of remediation between new media/digital video and cinema. It is almost as if a battle is being fought between the two and claims for territory are staked. Perhaps we are entering into a moment in which film and digital video can begin to end their complicated dance of remediation and go their separate ways, each with a valid sense of achievement. Put very simply again, perhaps film with its long and complex history is entering a moment, such as painting did in the early twentieth century, in which it will abandon realist representation to the more capable medium of digital video. Even as the statement ‘painting is dead’ has echoed through countless art school hallways painting has endured as an art form, and arguably had somewhat of a resurgence recently. So too, I would strongly argue that there is, and will continue to be, a very specific role for film in the artistic process.

Retromediation is the conscious return to an old(er) medium, especially faced with new(er) media that compete to occupy the same zones of production and creation. Retromediation clearly requires a self-conscious awareness of the medium and an explicit intent by the user/author in choosing to use an old(er) one. In our hypermediated environment of new media in the digital age I see a growing desire on the part of consumers, producers, and artists to return to old(er) media. Examples include vinyl collectors, independent music labels that release new music on vinyl or tape, 35mm camera enthusiasts, and most notably for our explication here artists working with celluloid film in the age of digital video.

In this section I will explore some of the impulses towards retromediation that could begin to describe this tendency. I can only begin to introduce the various contributions, each of which deserve a much more careful and lengthier treatment than can be afforded here.

HIGH-FIDELITY

As we venture forward into a digital era characterized by ever-higher resolution and increasingly high definition to borrow digital photography and video terminology, there is an implicit and embedded message that we are approaching a more accurate representation of reality. Paradoxically, the increasing level of fidelity has given rise to a skepticism of the verifiability and trustworthiness of the medium. The ease with which the ‘truth’ can be unrecognizably altered in a digital medium through photomanipulation or digital video trickery has called into question the believability of the medium.

 

Conversely, we enjoy a certain sense of comfortable familiarity with the techniques employed by old(er) media to fool and deceive viewers. Our perception and ability to read and locate these techniques of deception have evolved along with the medium itself, or at least we think they have. Therefore there is a level of trustworthiness when we see something represented on film.

REVIVALISM

Just as remediation is not specific or new to our digital environment, the act of revivalism also has its historical precedents. We can look back at Decorative Arts movements of the 19^th and 20^th centuries to see a consistent revivalism, basically anything prefaced by the term neo-. Early on, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of the mid-19^th century took a retrospective approach to avant-gardism. Examples such as these demonstrate that the new is sometimes the old.

NOSTALGIA

Many would argue that both revivalism and retromediation can be easily explained away by nostalgia. For me this is an oversimplification of something much more complicated. It isn’t even clear if nostalgia is at work at all. We can define this kind of temporal nostalgia as a longing to return to a previous time (alternately labeled rosy retrospection or the golden age phenomenon). Still, this does little to explain the kind of phenomenon we see today such as 17-year-old photographers like Olivia Bee developing an entire career using the tools of 35mm camera photography that pre-date her birth.

Furthermore, what does this nostalgia suppose about our digital age? If we acknowledge that nostalgia for a pre-digital past does play a part in retromediation this would imply a staunch opposition to the tools of the digital age at our disposal. I don’t believe this is completely the case. For example, Tacita Dean, who is often misread as a nostalgic artist, explicitly states that she has benefited from modern technologies such as 3D printing in the design of her installation (Dean 2011, 29). So many critics have presented Tacita Dean’s work as emblematic of nostalgia, decay, and obsolescence (Bowring 2008 160-167). This reading may on some level be valid but seems to be somewhat superficial. Dean herself is not so much concerned with a longing to return to the past but with carving out a place for the past in the future. Or as she puts it the “importance of analogue in the digital age” because “digital is not the analogue of analogue” (Dean 2011, 33)

LOGIC OF FASHION

There is also the haunting possibility that seems to have some merit that this tendency towards retromediation is some sort of logic of fashion. There is a clear and cyclical tendency towards revivalism in fashion, although the pace and predictability of this seems to be disrupted in our information age. Is it possible that there is a fashion or faddism for old(er) media as well? I think that this could apply as a partial explanation to certain aspects of consumer society. For example, in the past 10 or so years I have observed small independent record labels begin to release on first vinyl records, then on tape, and more recently on CDs. Still, there is an enduring quality to vinyl records, 35mm cameras, and celluloid film that lead us to retromediate towards them as I will soon explain.

NEO-LUDDISM

Retromediation could also be seen as a form of Neo-Luddism. Still, it is unlikely that most of the users, consumers, and artists who choose to retromediate have completely given up the trappings of digital culture. Instead there is more likely to be a hybridization or collocation of the two.

RESPONSE TO TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM

There is a stronger possibility that retromediation is a tacit response to technological determinism. It is quite possible that this tendency towards retromediation is a willing reaction to the idea that our world, our society and values, will be shaped by technology. This threat seems to be more and more disturbing as technology become more and more pervasive in our lives and thus it makes sense that a reactionary response to this threat would be growing.

POSTPRODUCTION

Artists are responding and reacting to the dominant form of the nineties that involved appropriation, remix, and consumption of the past. A rejection of the predominance of postproduction – both as an aesthetic form, and a technique made so much more available by digital media. In essence, artists at the vanguard of retromediation are less and less postproduction artists and more and more production artists instead. I would like to argue that this rejection of the post- in post-production is indicative of a larger notion of rejecting the post- in post-modern and returning to some of the aesthetic ideals of modernism such as emphasis on the materiality of the medium.

Instead of reimagining uses for past products, the original intended use is returned to and celebrated. This is in stark contrast to Bourriaud’s description of the dominant aesthetic quality of the flea market in relation to art in the nineties.

To briefly sum up Nicolas Bourriaud’s definition of postproduction artists these two quotes will be illustrative:

 

“An object once used in conformance with the concept for which it was produced now finds new potential uses in the stalls of the flea market” (Bourriaud 2002, 29).

“Postproduction artists invent new uses for works, including audio or visual forms of the past, within their own constructions.” (Bourriaud 2002, 45).

SCARCITY IN THE FACE OF PROSUMERISM

Following on from Bourriaud’s evaluation of the dominant aesthetic of the nineties in Postproduction, another useful concept can be gleaned from this text, the idea of prosumerism. Or, as he states it, the “ecstatic consumer of the eighties is fading out in favor of an intelligent and potentially subversive consumer: the user of forms” (Bourriaud 2002, 39). It was actually Alvin Toffler who coined the term prosumer as a portmanteau of production and consumer in 1971 while Lev Manovich arrived at its commonly understood usage today as a professional-grade consumer.

 

Essentially, an argument can be made that the ubiquity of professional quality equipment has undermined the privileged status of the artist/director. This democratization of production erodes the scarcity that contributes to value. As a result, some artists and directors are retromediating or returning to old(er) media for the scarcity value and rarity of technical expertise that is required to engage with such old(er) media.

MATERIALITY

I believe that above all the tendency towards retromediation has to do with the materiality and physicality of the medium and thus, above all, not simply a nostalgia trap. Against a background of post-media aesthetics in which the medium is not supposed to be of import, a number of artists are responding to the immateriality of such an approach by returning to mechanical or handmade methods of production. In other words they are retromediating. This material quality of the media could in some ways be thought of as a Derridean supplementarity as Gitelman and Pingree have suggested (2004, xiv).

In the case of film, the images captured on celluloid seem to express something very material about the medium they are captured on. We have come to read these signs of the medium as a marker for material quality. The grain, sprockets, and cue marks are essential qualities of the medium that we didn’t know were valued until they were lost. It is these imperfections, artifacts, and aberrations that are inscribed upon the very surface of the film that I would like to call the traces of production.

TRACES OF PRODUCTION

The traces of production are those elements and artifacts that remain in the realized product that point to the method used to create them. They are the graininess of a film grain, the dust on the lens of a camera reproduced in the image, or to use a classic example the stroke of the brush on the canvas.

 

I firmly believe that these methods of production are an essential quality of both authorship and spectatorship in a work of art. Harkening back to Lev Manovish’s assertion that we are in an age of post-media aesthetics, I must strongly qualify his statements. There is a stark distinction between content and context in this sense. Perhaps we can use the notion of a post-media aesthetic to explore new relationships, both intertextual(intermedia) and (a)historical. For this, I believe is the value of his assertion. This can only be done though by prioritizing the content and de-emphasizing the context.

 

In some cases, however, I believe just as McLuhan did that “the medium is the message,” at least in the context of contemporary art. In other words that the very awareness of the medium is the focal point of the work of art and that erasure or denial of the medium irrevocably damages our ability to view it. This self-conscious awareness of the medium and the valuation of traces of production is the very reason for retromediation by artists. As a spectator too we gain great pleasure from these traces of production, these indications of the hand at work. I am surely not alone when I admit that a large part of the museum experience for me is taken up by a sort of guessing game in which I attempt to speculate upon which medium each work was created. It is perhaps owing to the inability to touch most works of art that leads the tactility of the medium to take on a more immediate and visual urgency. It is this materiality of the medium in the traces of production that re-imagine the Benjaminian ‘aura’ in the work of art.

 

AURA

Put very simply, for Walter Benjamin, the aura of a work of art was its uniqueness originality, authenticity, and distance. Owing to the breadth of scholarship on aura I will not revisit an interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” but instead point you to three quotes that I have found useful in understanding the concept:

 

We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.(Benjamin 1968, 223).

 

“[aura] as an elusive phenomenal substance, ether, or halo that surrounds a person or object of perception, encapsulating their individuality and authenticity” (Hansen 2008, 340).

 

“the aura created through the artist’s imaginative labor, the trace-presence of something no longer literally, physically present but nonetheless still shimmering”

(Kaufman 2002, 46)

AURA STILL

In ‘Aura Still’ Robert Kaufman repositions Benjamin’s aura in conversation with Brecht and Adorno. He updates this conversation and most notably posits that:

 

“the real life of Benjamin’s mechanical-reproduction theory has occurred during its posthumous celebration in postmodernism, precisely the period in which the culture of the copy, simulacrum, and reproduction has come to make modernism itself look romantically auratic” (Kaufman 2002, 46).

 

This concept of romantically auratic modernism in relation to Benjamin’s original romanticization of painting and stage plays in the face of photography and film are important tools to helping us here to understand the auratic qualities of retromediation and traces of production in the digital age.

 

AURA NOW

Today aura is undergoing a reevaluation. The aura of Benjamin’s age of mechanical reproduction has clearly undergone a transition in the age of digital reproduction. Bolter may come closest to a conclusive statement when he points out that

 

“What Benjamin identified was not the end of aura, but rather an ongoing crisis, in which the experience of aura is alternately called into question and reaffirmed” (Bolter et al 2006, 21).

 

AURA AND HISTORICITY

To update Benjamin to a contemporary context, for he was writing during the infancy of film and writing in relation to painting, portraiture, and dramatic arts, one must look closely at the relationship between aura and historicity.

 

“The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well”(Benjamin 1968, 223).

 

Today, film has developed an aura of its own precisely because it is deemed to be scarce and rarified in relation to the work of art in the age of digital reproduction. There is a sense of historicity to the material quality of film that becomes evident in the traces of production.

 

Thus aura can be considered perhaps to be a relative phenomenon. In relation to digital video, film has come to signify a certain authenticity along the historicity-authenticity axis that Benjamin describes or as Grant Wythoff, quoting Benjamin puts it most clearly

“In a strange spatiotemporal convergence, spatial proximity to work of art entails a certain apprehension of the temporal distance or historicity, what Benjamin variously calls its “authenticity,” “historical testimony,” “the mark of history,” all of which must be encountered in the presence of “the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place” (Wythoff 2009).

 

AURA AND TRACES OF PRODUCTION

The relationship between traces of production and aura is thus one of broadcasting or signification. It is the traces of production that signify the materiality of the medium and its uniqueness and historicity. It is these historical marks that are inscribed upon the very material of the medium that allow us to gain access to an understanding of the authenticity of the original in a Benjaminian sense.

           

SELF-CONSCIOUS FILM

Film and the cinematic celluloid provide us with a clear example of these traces of production. Film has always been a self-conscious medium. From the start it has been aware of its inability to represent reality in a straightforward sense. In order to achieve a sense of narrative it must employ the artificial methods of cuts and edits. 

For film to succeed it has also had to become aware of the potential of the camera to influence perception. These camera techniques rely upon an awareness of medium itself, an awareness of the apparatus. The awareness of the role of the camera is made most clear in Hitchcock’s vertiginous dolly-zoom effect in Vertigo (1958).

CHINATOWN

In Roman Polanski’s neo-noir of 1974 Chinatown (itself a revival of genre), the director of photography John A. Alonzo employed a cinematographic technique known as the lens flare (figure 7). The lens flare relies on the anamorphic structure of the lens to diffuse light unevenly across the camera. This ocular property of the lens then creates an uneven distribution of light and dark. In Chinatown this technique was employed purposefully in order to create a heightened sense of the aridity of the drought-stricken Los Angeles of the 1930s.

The lens flare technique is an example of a trace of production, an ocular artifact of the lens, or might we say glitch of technology having become implicated in a signifying relationship with a spectatorial audience, creating a reality more real than reality (hyperreality). Let us unpack this statement. The lens flare is a glitch because it is an unintended effect of the technology or medium that serves to make the audience aware of the medium. It is therefore also a trace of production. It also an easily avoided glitch that had up until this point been negated by the use of the lens hood by cinematographers. It has been implicated in a signifying relationship with the audience because its purposive implementation has come to be associated with heat, aridity, and the desert. Finally, it is a Baudrillardian hyperreality in that it communicates the real only by exaggerating the artificial.

 

CELLULOID, CIGARETTES, and SPROCKETS

Film provides us with many more examples of traces of production. The celluloid materiality of the film embeds a certain graininess in its visual representation. It is not just celluloid that does so, all formats of film throughout the ages have a certain ascertainable mark of historicity that allow us to quickly approximate its vintage. In actuality, this is one of the most important concepts of the trace of production, as a marker of historicity. In all sense, the trace of production allows us to sub-consciously and visually access information regarding the epoch.

 

Another clearly visible marker of the trace of production in film is colloquially known as cigarette burns but are really cue marks. These cue marks appear as small dots in the upper corner of the film and go unnoticed to most audiences absorbed in the film. They are relics of the age of the mechanical projectionist to whom they signaled the impending end of one reel and to prepare to switch to the next. Similarly, the sprockets are the groove-like perforations on the edges of film that allow it to be fed through the projector. Also unnoticed by most audiences they are most clearly associated with the material quality of the film itself and its having to physically move through space. In early films these perforations are more often evident as the misalignment of the film with the projector would cause these edges to become apparent to the audience.

 

TACITA DEAN AND AURA

These traces of production in film, the graininess of the film, the cue marks, and the sprockets are what produce the filmic quality of film. In Tacita Dean’s 2011 work FILM these elements, the traces of production, are the very aspects that she seeks to highlight on a grand scale. She wishes for us to identify with the film as a material medium and to recognize the “importance of analogue in the digital age” (Cullinan 2011, title). It is by highlighting the traces of production emphasizing the continuing importance of its aesthetic qualities, and reviving the medium as a whole that Dean restores aura to that was originally the source of its decay. Tacita Dean’s work demonstrates that, in the digital age, there can be a distinctly auratic quality about film work that fulfills all of the criteria of Benjamin’s original aura – distance/depth, irreproducibility, and historicity.

 

—NEGATION OF NOSTALGIA

The return of the aura to film is in no way the same as nostalgically eulogizing the medium. In fact the traces of production that are the historicizing elements are what allows spectators to identify with the work. This is not to say as so many have that it is simply a case of artists like Dean having fallen into a nostalgia trap, but instead, as Tacita Dean’s curator for the Turbine Hall exhibition of FILM Nicholas Cullinan put it, a “revivification” of the medium (Cullinan et al 2011, p. 11).

 

—DISTANCE

As an epigraph to her essay in the accompanying catalogue Tacita Dean includes a quotation by French filmmaker and theorist Germaine Dulac

 

“The seventh art, that of the screen, is depth rendered perceptible, the depth that lies beneath that surface; it is the musical ungraspable.” (Dulac 1928, pp. 31-5 cited Dean 2011, p. 48)

 

In this way too Tacita Dean’s installation upends conventional notion of the non-auratic qualities of film. The scale and position of the installation in the massive space of the Turbine Hall invites the audience to choose to relate to the work at any distance with no clearly defined or proscriptive setting for spectatorship. Furthermore, there is an inherent transparency and distance to many of the scenes within the work as the back wall of the turbine hall itself is backgrounded.

Thus, Dean returns aura to film through the “phenomenon of distance.”

 

—REPRODUCIBILITY

Another key aspect of aura as we have noted is “uniqueness” or irreproducibility in contrast to mechanical or digital reproduction. With Dean’s installation exploring the aura of film she is denying this method of mechanical production its reproducibility. The very scale of the installation and the methods used to produce it including the vertically upended camera angle and anamorphism of the lens to name but a few clearly implicate the uniqueness of this installation in a particular place.

 

—HISTORICITY

Grant Wythoff most notably reads Benjamin’s notion of authenticity as linked to a notion of historicity and the marks of historicity. It is exactly this mark of history that can only be identified if the traces of production are evident, which they very notably are in the case of Dean’s installation.

“To be sure, a medieval picture of the Madonna at the time it was created could not yet be said to be ‘authentic.’ It became ‘authentic’ only during the succeeding centuries, and perhaps most strikingly so during the nineteenth” (as if aura is something cultivated). (Wythoff 2009)

 

It is here that we can again point to the 117 year-long history of film (as opposed to its 40 years in Benjamin’s time) as evidence of its ability to invoke aura. It is also true that if we believe aura to be a relative term, the auratic can only be defined in relation to the non-aruatic, just as Benjamin did in comparing painting and photography or theatre and film. Essentially then, aura/non-aura can be understood to be a relative phenomenon as opposed to a static one that privileges one medium over another. Therefore, in a digital age such as we live in, film can begin to take on an auratic quality in relation to digital video so long as it self-consciously expresses its traces of production rather than seeking to erase them. 

—TRACE, ARTIFACT, AND GLITCH

The traces of production heretofore explored have a very material and textual quality. They can be created by hand. They occur naturally through decay and degradation. They are artifacts of the method of production. And they connect us to the authorship and perhaps even the authorial intent.

Glitches are a truly analogous digital mechanism for exposing traces of production. They also owe a conceptual debt to readymades and later found photography like those employed by Richter and Dean (figures 1 and 2) Glitches can also be intentionally created and made to expose their own traces of production (see Cory Arcangel figure 4).

We must strive to enjoy, preserve, and utilize the medium-specific advantages of film for its aesthetic benefits, but regardless of the medium, it is most important to expose the traces of production so as to create an intimacy with the spectator and a sense of aura through historicity, distance, and irreproducibility. It is exactly these auratic qualities that the glitch imbues in a digital work. As traces of production they are at once medium-specific and specific to the historical technology that created them. They could be seen to create distance and depth since they expose the backside or underlying architecture of the program that is creating the visual representation. And finally, a true glitch, in opposition to a manufactured one, cannot be reproduced; it is a unique, temporary, and temporal event. There can be kinship in this from across the digital threshold when we look at the glitch as a trace of production.

It has not been the purpose of this exploration to speculate on the future but merely to explore tendencies by artists working in both analog and digital environments to intentionally expose the traces of production and to suggest that they may have a linked concern with reinvigorating authorial intent in the face of yet another wave of auratic reality machines. Ultimately then, the purpose of retromediation is to reintroduce the concept of medium in an age of post-media aesthetic by recognizing, absorbing, and exposing the traces of production inherent in each medium thereby returning the notion of aura to the work of art an age of post-media aesthetics.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean (1994). Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Benjamin, Walter (1968). ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’ Trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, New York: Shocken, pp.217-252.

Bourriaud, Nicolas (2001). Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 

Bowring, Jacky (2008). A Field Guide to Melancholy. Herts: Oldcastle Books

Bolter, Jay et al. (2006). ‘New Media and the Permanent Crisis of Aura.’ Convergence: the International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies, 12, London: Sage Publications, pp. 21-39. 

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin (2000). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Cullinan, Nicholas (2011). ‘Film Still.’ In FILM ed. Nicholas Cullinan, London: Tate Publishing, pp. 8-13.

Dean, Tacita (2011). ‘Film.’ In FILM ed. Nicholas Cullinan, London: Tate Publishing, pp. 15-48.

Derrida, Jacques (1981). Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dulac, Germaine (1928). ‘Visual and Anti-visual Films.’ In The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. New York, 1978, pp. 31-5. Quoted in FILM ed. Nicholas Cullinan, London: Tate Publishing, 2011 pp. 48.

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Appendix

(all images copyright the artist) 

Figure 1

Tacita Dean, Floh (2001)

Figure 2

 Gerhard Richter, Lovers in the forest / liebes paar im wald (1966)

Figure 3

Tacita Dean, FILM (2011)

 Figure 4

 Cory Arcangel, Screen Capture of Data Diaries 4 (2002)

http://www.turbulence.org/Works/arcangel/

 Figure 5

 Gerhard Richter, Juno (1983)

Figure 6

Roman Polanski, Still from Chinatown (1974)